Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading | Page 5

brethren, in the whole domain of morals. We are still suffering as a race in this regard. Take the sanctity of marriage, the facility of divorce, the chastity of woman, the shame, modesty, and bashfulness of girlhood, the abhorrence of illegitimacy, and there is no people in this land who, in these regards, have received such deadly thrusts as this race of ours. And these qualities are the grandest qualities of all superior people.
This moral elevation should be the highest ambition of our people. They make the greatest mistakes who tell you that money is the master need of our race. They equally err who would fain fasten your attention upon the acknowledged political difficulties which confront us in the lawless sections of the land. I acknowledge both of these grievances. But the one grand result of all my historic readings has brought me to this single and distinct conviction that "by the soul only the nations shall be free."
If I am not greatly at error, a mighty revolution is demanded of our race in this country. The whole status of our condition is to be transformed and elevated. The change which is demanded is a deeper one than that of emancipation. That was a change of state or condition, valuable and important indeed, but affecting mainly the outer conditions of our people; and that is all that a civil status can do. But outward condition does not necessarily touch the springs of life. That requires other, nobler, more spiritual agencies. What we need is a grand moral revolution, which shall touch and vivify the inner life of a people, which shall give them dissatisfaction with ignoble motives and sensual desires, which shall bring to them a resurrection from inferior ideas and lowly ambitions; which shall shed illumination through all the chambers of their souls, which shall lift them up to lofty aspirations, which shall put them in the race for manly moral superiority. A revolution of this kind is not a gift which can be handed over by one people, and placed as a new deposit in the constitution of another. Nor is it an acquisition to be gained by storm, by excitement, or frantic and convulsive agitation, political or religious. The revolution of which I speak must find its primal elements in qualities, latent though they be, which reside in the people who need this revolution, and which can be drawn out of them, and thus secure form and reality.
The basis of this revolution must be character. That is the rock on which our whole race in America is to be built up. Our leaders are to address themselves to this main and master endeavor--viz., to free them from false ideas and injurious habits, to persuade them to the adoption of correct principles, to lift them up to superior modes of living, and so bring forth, as permanent factors in their life, the qualities of thrift, order, virtue, and manliness.
But who are the agents to bring about this grand change in the Negro race? Remember, just here, that all effectual revolutions in a people must be racial in their characteristics. You can't take the essential qualities of one people and transfuse them into the blood of another people, and make them indigenous to them. The primal qualities of a family, a race, a nation are heritable qualities. They abide in their constitution. They remain, notwithstanding the conditions and the changes of rudeness, slavery, civilizations, and enlightenment. It is a law of moral elevation that you must allow the constant abidance of the essential elements of a people's character; therefore when I put the query, Who shall be the agent to raise and elevate our race to a higher plane of being? the answer will at once flash upon your intelligence. It is to be effected by the scholars and philanthropists which come forth in these days from the schools. They are the people to transform, stimulate, and uplift, because it is a work of intelligence; it is a work which demands historic facts and their application to new circumstances.
But these reformers must not be mere scholars. The intellect is to be used, but mainly as the vehicle of mind and spiritual aims, and hence these men must needs be both scholars and philanthropists.
Allow me, in the conclusion of this article, to express the hope that He who holds the hearts of all men will give you the spirit to forget yourselves, and live for the good of man and the glory of God. Such a field and opportunity are graciously opened to you in the conditions and needs of our race in this country. May you and I be equal to them!

LAYING THE CORNER STONE.[A]
(FROM THE DAILY AMERICAN.)
Prof. W. H. Council, Principal of the Normal Industrial School, was